July 15, 2013

• Some Xanga Reflections

  I’ve been settling in for some time over at WP (sorry to say, for those who find it a failing of loyalty or commitment or hope or something), and overall, I find I like it just fine. It feels much like my early years at Xanga when I had a few followers and friends who consistently commented but never saw myself on the front page. I blogged in obscurity. I thought of it then as a character-building exercise, in a way, writing blogs for my own purposes and not for the purpose of attracting more readers, kind of like making art for the sake of advancing an artistic conversation rather than making it to get famous.

  After the Great Fall, as I personally like to think of it, the period of time when all the Xangalebrities seemed to leave overnight for FB and Twitter and whatever else, it was easy to find myself on the front page. The old Xangalebrities would say they took all the competition with them; when you can write whatever you want for ten or eleven people and get on the front page, you can’t take any pride in getting on the front page. Back in the day you’d need at least 200 or 300 commenters to get anywhere near the front page. So the Xangalebrities deserted Xanga and left us with a substandard front page filled with bloggers like…me.

  The loss of the Xangalebrities, the loss of the days when blogs frequently garnered 200 or 300 comments has been described as the loss of “content.” I don’t know if that’s true. I used to read the Xangalebrities back in the day, just for fun, the same way I read the front page today. Just to see what’s going on in the community, what the loudest voices are saying, and while I didn’t think anything bad about any of their blogs I didn’t particularly think they were chock full of content. I mean, whatever, I like posts that are tl;dr. I like analysis more than ranting, wittiness better than straight comedy, information more than recaps of popular media sources. But, I mean, each to his own.

  And I suppose, in a way, this reflects the difference between thinking of Xanga as a blogging platform and thinking of Xanga as a social networking site, a community.

  I’ve learned a lot from Xanga over the years, both in terms of sheer education from reading other people’s opinions and ideas and links, and in terms of the process of writing and, more specifically, my process of writing.

  Today is the day Xanga was meant to disappear. I remember when @roadlesstaken (on his radio show) asked Xanga Team John about whether the deadline was a hard deadline, July 15, and John responded that he didn’t think he had the ability to change the crowdhoster date. But he looked into it, he said, on the site, and indeed he could change the deadline. It seemed to me at the time that @roadlesstaken was asking a slightly different question, not so much, “do you have the ability to alter the date on the fundraising website,” but more, “is Xanga out of money and out of servers and doomed if you don’t have the money by July 15?”

  Those seem to me to be two different questions, but then as I’ve suggested above, I’m overly analytical.

  I love the post on the fundraising site with the adorable photos of Xanga Team John’s young children, because a) the children are adorable; and b) it supports my personal vision about the nature of this fundraising effort and the past and future of Xanga.

  I’ve said before that for me, the switch to Xanga 2.0 according to Xanga Team John is an “opt out” rather than an “opt in,” because I’m already a lifetime premium member in good standing. I’ve been very on the fence about how to proceed and I figured I’d do some serious thinking and decision-making over the weekend of July 12-14. Imagine my surprise when I discovered I could put it off for two more weeks. Surprise and also a vague feeling of irritation, because when big events are coming up in my life I like for them just to happen already, and not linger around plaguing me with their unsettledness.

  I know. This post: tl;dr.

  • 2:52 pm
  • 16 Comments